Kim Kashkashian’s album Kurtág/Ligeti: Music for Viola, has won a Grammy Award in the category Best Classical Instrumental Solo, it was announced at the 55th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles on February 10th 2013. One of the preeminent artists of ECM New Series, Kim Kashkashian has devoted herself to Hungarian composer György Kurtág’s œuvre for viola for more than 20 years and developed a remarkable rapport for the relation between compositional fabric and sonic nuance when performing it. On this solo album she explores the contrasts and the interconnections between Kurtág’s sound-world and that of his late friend and contemporary György Ligeti. “In Kashkashian’s scrupulous reading,” Wolfgang Sandner has written, “the Kurtág pieces and the movements of Ligeti’s Viola Sonata seem like the work of a single visionary artist”.

The disc has received many positive notices from the international press. As Joshua Kosman wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle: “Violist Kim Kashkashian has been an eloquent and impassioned champion of the music for her instruments for decades now. But this solo CD finds her at the peak of her expressive and technical powers, playing music for unaccompanied viola by two of the great contemporary masters, György Kurtág and György Ligeti. It’s a terrific pairing of two linked but complementary sensibilities, matching Kurtág’s terse, aphoristic style with Ligeti’s more expansive and playful creative personality.”

Other recordings of Kurtág by Kim Kashkashian on ECM include Hommage à R. Sch. with Robert Levin and Eduard Brunner, and Bartók/Eötvös/Kurtág with the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra under Peter Eötvös.